Making Activities With Electronic Textiles in an American Indian Community School

• In Event: Toward Building Makerspaces for All: New Theories and Practices to Design Inclusive Makerspaces

Abstract

In November of 2014, E-Line media released Never Alone, a video game based on Alaska Native ways of knowing and developed in partnership with Upper One games, the first Indigenous-owned game company in the United States. “We were looking at how we can connect with our young people, how to use the gifts we have and use the power of technology, how to be progressive,” said Gloria O’Neill, President and CEO of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (Dunham, 2014). President O’Neill highlights a tension many Indigenous communities are facing - how to connect with young people while recognizing that technology is a part of their lives?

Discourses of technology use are typically framed in terms of digital equity, yet relatively little is known about how American Indian students and teachers access, use, and (dis)identify with digital technologies (Adcock, 2014; Morris & Meinrath, 2009). While access to computers (and other digital technologies) and the Internet remains a significant issue in some portions of Indian Country, larger conversations about broadening participation suggest that there are two key issues that we need to pay attention to: (1) How and why American Indian students and teachers are using digital technologies (Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010)? And (2) To what extent teachers and students are becoming producers in the digital realm and taking ownership of their productions (Kafai & Burke, 2014; Tan et al., 2013)? Making activities with electronic textiles (e-textiles) provide one way of fostering connections to community-based ways of knowing while engaging American Indian youth in learning with digital technologies. The LilyPad Arduino kit for making e-textiles combines a small, sewable microcontroller with a variety of sensors and actuators. Using a needle and conductive thread, components are sewn together and then programmed. The result is a soft, student-built computer. Through this purposeful combination of traditional and heritage craft practices with digital technologies, there is an opportunity to leverage making activities to create a strong cultural connection and broaden participation in STEM fields.

This presentation draws upon a year-long ethnographic examination of how e-textiles materials were taken up by an American Indian teacher and his students within the context of a Native Studies class to illuminate some of the tensions and possibilities around making activities in an American Indian community school. Data sources included daily field notes, video taped classroom sessions, final reflective interviews with students, quarterly reflective interviews with the teacher, student-generated design documents, and photographs of student work. Data were analyzed using an open coding process to allow themes to emerge from the data (Charmaz, 2000).

Findings highlight the need for an expansive view of technology, the complexities of attempting to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, being, valuing, and teaching within the U.S. educational system, and the ways in which novel activities and materials may open up spaces for circumventing traditional educational structures. These findings contribute to understandings of how digital technologies are used by American Indian students and teachers and provide guidance about how to develop more inclusive making activities and makerspaces.

Author

• Kristin Anne Searle, Utah State University